A lot is at stake when small businesses make new hires. The costs associated with assessing candidates, onboarding, and training a new employee have a noteworthy bottom line impact, which is why it’s so crucial to hire the right person – the first time.

Automated pre-hire assessments have made the hiring process less complicated and more efficient for both human resources and applicants. By leveraging structured, job-relevant questionnaires, hiring managers drastically increase the likelihood of finding a top performer the first time.

In doing so, firms are able to make better use of their resources and minimize risk associated with making a bad hire. The benefits below can mean big savings for even the smallest of firms or the youngest of start-ups.

1. Better Quality of Hire

The application pool has changed drastically in recent years. In addition to a massive population of job-hunters, it’s now easier than ever for candidates to find and apply to vacancies. Consequently, decision-makers are forced to weed through hundreds of candidates without exposing themselves to compliance risks or succumbing to “false positives,” or people who seem like the real deal, but turn out be as over-exaggerated as their resume.

A recent study of 400 firms conducted by Aberdeen found “automation is having an impact on both the quality of hires and the quality of the hiring process.” With automated candidate assessments, HR can quickly and effectively determine which candidates offer a strong job fit and which are really just tire kickers.

When multiple assessments are leveraged – for instance, a personality assessment and automated reference checking – decision makers gain the advantage of incremental predictability, or the ability to effectively predict candidate performance from multiple indicators.

2. Less Time Wasted

For too many firms, hiring is a long, drawn out process that is both daunting to the hiring manager and unattractive to prospective top performers. However, with automated assessments, what formerly took weeks, or even months, is now reduced to days.

With only a few clicks of the mouse, hiring managers are delivered easy-to-understand results that clearly indicate which candidate will be the best driver of business. The benefits are simple:

• No more subjective, time-consuming resume scanning
• No more phone tag with reference providers
• More efficient collaboration with other decision makers

Do you or your company have the luxury of not needing such improvements to your hiring process?

3. Improved Culture Fit

In addition to saving time, new automated hiring technology can help identify candidates that best fit your company culture. Jim Collins, author of From Good to Great, states, “In determining “˜the right people,’ the good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge or work experience.”

Culture matters in any business, but for start-ups in which there are few divisions between employees, it can be an especially critical consideration. Assessments that leverage benchmarks based on your firm’s unique values and beliefs can predict whether candidates will excel in your unique workplace environment before they even step foot through the door.

It only takes one hiring – especially a bad one – to realize that identifying and retaining new employee costs much more than just their offered salary. A company pays for the resources, time, and training that a new hire acquires, and too often they do so before they or the candidate are certain that it’s a mutually good fit.

Automated assessment save resources, helping companies quickly and effectively narrow down the applicant pool to only the most qualified individuals. For start-ups, the difference between hiring the right candidate the first time and throwing away resources on a bad hire can also be the difference between rapid growth and squashed success.

About The Guest Author:    Greg Moran is the President and CEO of  Chequed, an employee selection and automated reference checking technology suite, as well as a respected author on Human Capital Management with published works including Hire, Fire & The Walking Dead and Building the Talent Edge.  Greg can be found blogging at  disrupthr.com, on twitter  @CEOofChequed  and  Google+.

Hire Photo via Shutterstock